Where the cash comes from
One site publishes a full payout model. It is the most detailed thing anyone has, and it cites nothing at all, so read this table as what wardogs.zone publishes rather than as measured fact. We have not tested a single line of it.
| What you did | Cash |
|---|---|
| Kill, outside the zone250 XP with it | $300 |
| Kill, inside the Control ZoneThe same kill, five times the money | $1,500 |
| Kill, inside the Hot ZoneTen times | $3,000 |
| HeadshotAdded to the kill, before multipliers | $50 |
| Control Zone entryOne-off, per entry | $250 |
| Presence tick, Control ZoneEvery 22 seconds you are inside and alive | $160 |
| Presence tick, Hot ZoneConsecutive ticks add $50, up to $500 | $320 |
| Revive, Control Zone$400 in the open, $1,600 in the Hot Zone | $800 |
| Revive with a defibrillatorIn the Control Zone; $2,400 in the Hot Zone | $1,200 |
| Driving a squad into the zonePer passenger delivered by ground, $150 by air | $500 |
| Marking an enemy$400 more when the marked enemy dies | $100 |
| Tower capture$750 if you take it off a hostile holder | $250 |
| Destroying a tankAttack helicopter $9,000, artillery tank $14,000 | $7,000 |
| First place at the whistlePlus 30% of what you earned that match, capped at $100,000 | $1,000 |
A team kill costs three times what the kill would have paid.
Position beats loadout
Read the top of that table again. A kill outside the zone pays $300; the same kill inside the Control Zone pays five times that, and inside the Hot Zone ten. No rifle in the game moves your income by a factor of ten — the gap between a free rifle and the $6,500 one is milliseconds, not multiples.
The steadier money is quieter still. A presence tick pays $160 every 22 seconds for standing inside the zone alive, which is $480 a minute for doing the thing that also wins the match. Reviving inside the zone pays more than the kill that dropped the body.
An empty server pays nothing
The same model scales every payout by how many people are on the server. Under ten players on the server the model pays nothing at all, and the full rate arrives only at sixty.
| On the server | You are paid |
|---|---|
| 10 players | 15% of the rate |
| 20 players | 20% of the rate |
| 25 players | 30% of the rate |
| 30 players | 40% of the rate |
| 35 players | 50% of the rate |
| 40 players | 70% of the rate |
| 45 players | 80% of the rate |
| 50 players | 90% of the rate |
| 60 players | 100% of the rate |
What BULKHEAD changed in September
This is the part the other money guides do not carry. Their payout figures are mostly from the Closed Alpha, and the game has been rebalanced twice since. These lines are quoted from BULKHEAD's own posts:
| When | What the post says |
|---|---|
| 9 Sep 2026Season 1 changelog | “Supply crate item sold under $75: 25 XP to 1 XP.”The crate-selling loop that older guides still recommend pays a twenty-fifth of the XP it did. |
| 9 Sep 2026Season 1 changelog | “Rescaled the supply crate purchase curve from 25 to 250 down to 1 to 200, so low value items are priced sensibly and cannot be abused.”BULKHEAD's own words for why it changed: the loop was abusable. |
| 9 Sep 2026Season 1 changelog | “Player kill using an air vehicle: 300 XP to 250 XP.”Gunship farming pays less XP than it did in the beta. |
| 9 Sep 2026Season 1 changelog | “Vendor, Forward Operating Base: $2,500 to $7,500.”The cost side moved too: a FOB is three times what the pre-launch guides quote. |
| 9 Sep 2026Season 1 changelog | “Levels 10 to 20 slowed down, with the curve flattening from 35 onward.”Income buys gear sooner than levels do, so the wallet runs ahead of the unlocks. |
| 12 Sep 2026Patch 0.11 | “By way of apology, for the next week community servers will offer a bonus 5% End of Match cash bonus.”A one-week promotion announced on 12 September, so it lapses around 19 September. Check before you plan an evening around it. |
| 12 Sep 2026Patch 0.11 | “Various cash exploits have been fixed.”Any route you read about from before this date may simply be gone. |
The farm that ends the account
On 12 Sep 2026 BULKHEAD put a section titled “Our Stance on Economy Abuse” in the patch notes. We did not find it on any of the four money guides we compared. It is short and it is specific:
- Abusing cash exploits and bugs. “We will respond with a timed ban, the length of which will be determined based on any previously applied bans. We will reset your cash and XP to 0.”
- Creating content that tutorialises economy exploits and bugs. “We will treat creating content that tutorialises how to abuse systems, with no regard for reporting the issue, as advertising cheats. This will result in a permanent ban.”
- XP farming. “We track every server you enter, and we are also very aware of which servers are XP farming servers. If your account is tracked as joining one of these servers for more than a few minutes, we will ban your account permanently.”
Read the last one twice. It is not about running the farm — it is about joining a server known for it, for more than a few minutes. If you are shopping for a fast route to a wallet, that is the one route that costs you everything you have earned.
BULKHEAD treats published exploit tutorials as advertising cheats. We are not going to write one, and a site that does is telling you to risk a permanent ban for a few thousand dollars of in-game cash.
What an evening actually buys
Income only means something against the price list. If the presence tick is really $160, then an M4 at $2,800 is 18 ticks in the zone — about 7 minutes of standing in the right square, before anything you earn from kills, revives or the whistle.
Scale that up and the shape of the economy shows. The SPH-2 costs $8,000 at the vendor, but the one-time Career unlock behind it is $500,000 — roughly 19 hours of uninterrupted zone presence at that rate. That is the real gate on the big equipment, and it is why the unlock column matters more than the price tag.
The short version
- Be in the zone, alive
Ticks pay for standing; kills pay five to ten times more inside than out. Everything else is a rounding error against position.
- Play the jobs nobody wants
On this model a revive in the zone out-earns the kill, and driving a squad in pays per passenger.
- Fill the server
Under ten players the model pays nothing at all, and full rate needs sixty.
- Spend behind the earnings
Keep a full rebuy in reserve. A loadout is money spent the moment you die, and what comes back is still unsettled.
- Stay off the farm servers
Permanent ban, in BULKHEAD's own words, for joining one for more than a few minutes.